Confession time. As a creative writing instructor, I’m super selective about the examples I use to demonstrate craft. If I’m going to share an excerpt from another writer’s work, it can’t just be technically correct; it must make the group laugh out loud, or choke up, or sit in stunned silence while they regain their composure because the resonant ending has left them unable to speak. 

Okay, I’m describing me, but I hope I’m eliciting a similar reaction in my students. 

Which is why I was surprised a couple of weeks ago when, at the end of a story numerous workshops have found moving, one participant raised his hand and said, “I hate this story. It’s overwritten, ridiculous, and manipulative. I don’t know if this writer is a beginner or what, but it shows.”

Everyone else suddenly looked expressionless, like 30 small businesses had just closed. 

I have learned that in any group, there is likely to be a contrarian. Someone who begs to differ, who needs to disagree, just to disagree. It’s human nature. 

And I’m smiling at the one of you muttering, “No, it’s not.”

But I thought I would sound defensive if I mentioned that the writer of the sample piece had published 19 novels, 150 short stories, a multitude of them in The New Yorker, and had also won the Pen Faulkner award for Excellence in Literature. 

Twice. 

So, I asked more about the objector’s objections, and I could agree to a point. I’ve never read anything I wouldn’t have edited a little differently and said so, respectfully acquiescing to some of his criticisms. But the guy wouldn’t let it go, and I started to think, Okaaay, you are becoming a little hard to love, mister. Still, I wanted to listen more than to explain, and I recognize that “Because I said so” is an immature response in any context. 

But is it? 

I’m sharing this because everything I have learned about writing is true of life. 

Take vulnerability. In most workshops, you give everyone a copy of the story you have birthed with great effort, then listen in enforced silence as the group discusses it. The theory is you need to really absorb the criticism—not be distracted by defending the work.

It’s super fun, like being gagged and tied up while strangers abscond with your baby. 

But in a good workshop, your baby is nurtured by intelligent people who recognize her charms and offer insightful suggestions that improve her chances of survival. The instructor protects you from well-meaning participants who tend to point at you while they speak. In a great workshop, you learn that you can cut the whole first page and enter the story on fire. This kind of feedback makes you grateful you live in a democracy—groups are smart. 

But groups, like life, can also be full of overworked, tired people and one or two cranks, and the instructor may not keep people from addressing you directly, people to whom, by the rules of engagement, you are not allowed to respond. 

And in truly bad workshops, no one bothers to point out what is working in your story because they assume you already know all the good stuff, so they just get right down to pointing out all the places your story fails, like this is a moral obligation.  

Some of us have friends like this. Some of us may be friends like this. Writing and life. I keep telling you. Same-same. 

I have not tried this, but I have a theory: if you did nothing but read a story and praise what works, the writer would gradually improve through praise alone. And your kids might, and your spouse might—might get braver, take more chances, and, in feeling safe, be funnier, more insightful, and inspired. Impulsively hug you tight. Spontaneously reach for your hand in a parking lot.

My friend Margaret attended a writing retreat like this. The teacher’s instructions were simple: “Each day we’ll write stories from the heart, read them aloud, and tell each other what we love about them. No criticism and no suggestions allowed.” Margaret was a bit disappointed. With those limitations, she figured she’d just paid for a week’s change of scene, but that her writing would not improve. 

But she said later, “I was wrong about that. I learned I can write from the heart, hear good things about that effort, and be forever changed.” By nothing more than the reinforcement of the good! “I began to find my voice,” she continued. “They called me ‘a weaver,’ and they called me that again and again.” 

For some reason, I was deeply moved by this. Something about the word “weaver,” I think. About being seen over and over, which implies being witnessed by someone who stayed. 

I once had a dream in which I inexplicably and repeatedly heard the word “Rabbi”. I’m not Jewish, but I’ve learned to embrace what seems to come from nowhere. So, I explored the meaning, which in Hebrew is “teacher.” And I felt called somehow. Loved somehow. And moved by this as well. 

Years later, someone called me a healer, and it had the same effect. A stunned, “Really?” Followed by a sense of having been called by name.

Read me your story and I will tell you everything I love about it. Will you be changed?

My guess is yes. 

Writing and life. Same/same.

Our brain’s predilection for storytelling may be why, even now, every time I cross the Bay Bridge, that 4.4-mile-long arc spanning the Chesapeake, I imagine my car breaking through the safety rails, going over the side, or the pavement giving way beneath my tires. 

When the kids were little, they would voice their own ideas about surviving a plunge from the bridge and speak loudly of the brave and clever things they would do to save themselves.

My son, at age five, would escape from the car as it sank and hang onto floating debris—although he mulls over for quite a while whether he would hang onto a dead shark if it were the only thing available. 

My daughter, eight, would float on her back when tired and do the sidestroke to the nearest beach. There, she would build a small fire and arrange shells in pretty patterns. 

I remained quiet as they played this game, intent on formulating my own plan—a strategy similar to my daughter’s, amended by swimming with two awkward burdens. 

It was a silly exercise, but we seemed compelled to do it, and I found myself pinioned in the grip of my own imagination on each crossing. Could I break the windows as we sank? Get seatbelts unbuckled in time? And it was always my heart that broke instead, knowing I could not save us all. 

My son discards his shark dilemma and thinks he will meet the water in a perfect dive. But sometimes we fall too hard to be rescued, which is why I still seek a contingency plan.

It was a sweltering, humid July afternoon, and friends and I were swimming off the Magothy River’s north shore near two small landmasses —Dutch Ship Island and a smaller island, nearer to shore, we called Little Dutch. We could swim to Little Dutch, but usually skied around it instead, as it was privately owned, and we were intimidated by the fact that there was a house on it. 

This particular afternoon, we decided to ski. I can’t say for sure who was driving the Whaler, but the older, better skiers went first, kids 15, 16, and a couple of grades ahead. After refueling at Gray’s Creek, it was my turn to give it a try. 

I rose from the water on my second attempt, having only learned to ski that summer and the Whaler swung wide, out toward the island. The air that had been so oppressive on the beach was soft and sweet on the water, an offshore breeze that carried with it the smell of honeysuckle at its peak and the pungent counterpart of dried seaweed lacing the shore. I was aware of every detail: the towrope in my hands, the drone of the motor, the cliffs of Big Dutch, where shadows moved in the underbrush. 

We had circled the island once when the driver of the boat motioned toward the beach. It was clear he wanted to change course. Nervous, I knew I would have to cross the wake if he turned. He gestured again, and I suddenly saw myself as I must appear to my friends, inexpertly trailing the boat, a boring and inexpert 14-year-old. At that exact moment, the Whaler entered a tight turn.

My skis bumped over the first two ripples of wake streaming back from the stern without incident, but I was skimming over the water sideways much faster than when I had been directly behind the boat. Glancing down, I saw the river beneath my skis had become the blur of solid pavement, and I was accelerating way beyond my ability to stay upright. Doomed by my own panic, falling was as inevitable as the compulsion to touch a knife, to test the sharpness of the blade.

It was a spectacular fall, even witnessed from the beach. I slammed into the water so hard my body bounced off without breaking the surface several times, carried forward by unstoppable momentum. I knew I was hurt, but the ski belt kept me afloat in the murky river water until I was picked up, and it was several days before I saw a doctor. My injuries were minor by medical standards, healing in a few weeks, but it cost me a week in Ocean City with my best friend. 

Now, when I cross the bridge untested, I look back and see the high cliffs of Dutch Ship where the river meets the bay before the suspension cables fade like Camelot in the haze behind me. The cars streaming over it, briefly visible in the back window, look like the die-cast matchbox variety I tossed into the toybox in the years I made myself prepare for the worst possible loss. In the years I believed in contingency plans.

No one is dependent on me now. I take quick glimpses at the massive, sparkling expanse beneath me. At the I glory, the immensity of all that water and all that sky. At the grandeur that whispers surely there is something more.

I decide that just for today, I will trust that if the bridge ever collapses, I will be caught, carried, and delivered safely to the opposite shore. 

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Laura J. Oliver is an award-winning developmental book editor and writing coach, who has taught writing at the University of Maryland and St. John’s College. She is the author of The Story Within (Penguin Random House). Co-creator of The Writing Intensive at St. John’s College, she is the recipient of a Maryland State Arts Council Individual Artist Award in Fiction, an Anne Arundel County Arts Council Literary Arts Award winner, a two-time Glimmer Train Short Fiction finalist, and her work has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Her website can be found here.